John Wheeler came to nondual teaching through Bob Adamson, the Australian student of Nisargadatta Maharaj, whom he sought out in Melbourne in 2003 after years of unresolved searching. In Bob’s company, by his own account, the search came to a full stop, and the conversation and correspondence between the two continued for years afterward. He carries that lineage forward in plain American English, with an unusual emphasis on the immediate and present nature of one’s own being and the absolute uselessness of waiting for a future event called enlightenment.
His teaching reduces to a single pointing. The sense I am, the basic fact of one’s own existence, is itself the door. It is not a thought, not a concept, not an experience to be added to other experiences. It is what is most intimate, most familiar, most undeniable, and at the same time most overlooked. The work, if it can be called work, is to notice what is already and obviously the case. All problems belong to the I, he says. See through the I, and the problems lose their owner.
He has written half a dozen short books in clear unornamented prose, and he carries on long correspondences with seekers around the world, many of which have been collected into volumes that read as a kind of contemporary upadesa-sahasri. He lives quietly in Northern California, where he has worked for years as a technical writer.
An example of the teaching
The basic exercise in Awakening to the Natural State takes about a minute. Right now, are you present? Are you aware? Before any answer forms, the fact is already confirmed. You did not need to consult a thought, check a memory, or achieve a special state to know that you exist and that experience is registering. That immediate, effortless certainty of being is what he means by the natural state, and he insists that the entire teaching is contained in noticing it.
The second half of the exercise turns toward the apparent obstacle. We grant that being is present, then add that something is still wrong with me, the one who has it. He asks the reader to look for that one. Search direct experience for the deficient, separate self the thoughts describe. What is actually found is the same as what Bob Adamson found and what Nisargadatta pointed to: sensations, images, and the recurring I-thought, with no actual entity behind them. The problems were filed under a name with no bearer. Seen clearly even once, he says, the seeking loses its premise, and what remains is the simple being-awareness that was never absent through any of it.
Where to start
- Awakening to the Natural State: his tightest short book.
- Shining in Plain View: a longer collection of dialogues and correspondence.
- The Light Behind Consciousness: pointed back at the source-awareness that even consciousness arises within.
- The Natural State site: an online collection of his teachings, with free PDF editions of all his books.
